MP: Public have a right to know if the RSPCA is being driven by animal rights agenda

Ahead of a Commons debate, Simon Hart MP says the public needs to know the charity's
prosecution policy is being driven by public interest not political
ideology.

10:00PM GMT 28 Jan 2013

The animal welfare charity already faces allegations of political bias after spending £326,000 prosecuting members of the Heythrop Hunt.

Prime Minister David Cameron is a local MP in the area and had previously ridden with the Heythrop Hunt before law was changed to ban fox-hunting.

The hunt and its members were fined £6,800 after admitting four charges of unlawfully hunting a wild fox with dogs. The judge in the case drew attention to the fact that the private prosecution cost nearly 10 times more than the defence costs of £35,000.

The Commons debate will focus on the RSPCA’s prosecutorial role and its political and commercial objectives.

Conservative MP Simon Hart, who is a former chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, said: "My concern is, where there is a political and commercial activity which the charity is unsurprisingly involved with, can it be completely objective, as it says it is, when it comes to prosecuting people?

"I think there is a number of members of parliament who are going to raise examples of potential conflicts of interest and just suggest to the Attorney General that this is an area that needs to be looked at."

He said the RSPCA's decision to prosecute the Heythrop Hunt may have been entirely legitimate, but "in a sense we need to know there is a good reason and we need to know the way in which these cases are brought is to the same standard as cases brought by the CPS.

"That they do past the public interest test and that all the sort of checks and balances that we expect in the legal system are there."